I discovered Seth Godin 14 years ago, and was following his blog with interest. He is an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age.
In those days of Work From Home and COVID-19 social distancing, we are all obliged to shift to video conferencing, and if it offers new opportunities, we need to understand how to use VC tools to make those meetings useful and productive. And this is why I started looking for resources, tutorials, references on the Internet.
This is how some days ago, I received a suggestion to read on his blog a post with the title « The conversation – a short manifesto about the future of online interaction ». I found the article very inspiring as it highligths the difference between « real life » and « online » meetings.
He very well describes how « classical » meetings can be extremely boring, and explains how to have online meetings is an opportunity to do something new and something better.
Real-life meetings are among the most hated part of work for the typical office worker. They last too long, happen too often and bore and annoy most of the people who attend. They can mostly be replaced by a memo (if they’re about transferring information) or they could be better run (if they’re about transforming information.)
What Seth Godin proposes instead is to use VC to have a conversation with the participants, to be organised taking into account a few key principles:
0. The most important: Only have a real-time meeting if it deserves to be a meeting.
1. People come to the meeting ready to have a conversation.
2. Part of being engaged means being prepared.
3. Organize a conversation. That can’t work at any scale more than five. How then, to do an event with hundreds of people? The breakout. (…)
More to read on his blog, enjoy and use this as an inspiration for your next VC on Zoom or whatever!
Broebelghem 